Author: Katalin Doczi

In the past 2 years, we have been experimenting with a relatively new framework called a Design Sprint. We try to apply it at the start of our new projects. We really liked the concept but lacked a resource that explained how to do a Design Sprint in visuals. So we created a Design Sprint hand-out ourselves.

“What is a Design Sprint?” – you might ask.

Well, to stay brief and to the point, it is a framework of 5 days of activities that can help your product team validate new product concepts super quick with your future audience – your users – without the need to build anything… wow!

Validate in the shortest amount of time

We at TOPdesk find it really important to include developers (a Scrum team) early on in the product development process for multiple reasons;

To establish a shared understanding of the business goals (viability) with important project stakeholders

Their insights are crucial during concept development from their respective field(s) (technological feasibility)

To build empathy towards the target users of the project (desirability) with the team who will actually build the product

We believe that Design Sprints can help to a great extent to reach these objectives. While there is a tremendous amount of information to be found about this method online, we (the UX design team at TOPdesk) wanted to provide a brief visual overview to participants of Design Sprints about how we use this framework in the context of the work we do at TOPdesk.

We have noticed in the past years that our developers sometimes felt uncomfortable attending these weeks, simply because the word “Design Sprint” left them with doubts.

“I’m not a designer, what will I be doing there?”

“Wow, I cannot draw, why do they want me to attend?”

In our Design Sprint Handout, we provide short visual examples of each exercise during a Design Sprint. We hope that this booklet will help anyone to understand that Design Sprints are not about how good you draw. They are about building a concept together as a team and validating if you are on the right track with users, during a course of a week.

Today, almost 2 years later and after having roughly 10 Design Sprints behind us, we are happy to have a handbook that can be used by any designer, Scrum Master, or creative facilitator to give them a kick-start in running workshops like the Design Sprint. The handbook can also be used to just get inspired by these methods, as the methods described in the booklet could be applied anytime during the development process.

If you want to get a better understanding of what the process behind a Design Sprint at TOPdesk looks like and understand why so many of us are excited about it, then go ahead, download it! Feel free to use it, share it or just simply read it to learn more about this great approach to lean and user-centered software development!